Incantation
by BlackBloodInsane
Summary: Feliciano Vargas thought he knew himself; son, grandson, dearest friend. But truth is rare in this cruel and unforgiving century in Spain. Then: a startling dicovery shakes Feli's world to the core. Emerging from a cocoon of secrets. Feliciano must find the strength to become the person he's destined to be...Remember the story he's about to tell you...
1. Ashes

Incantation

By BlackBloodInsane

Disclaimer: I do not own Incantation or Hetalia

O~0

_I thought I knew the world_

_I thought I knew myself_

_I thought I knew my dearest friend_

_But I knew nothing at all..._

_~ Feliciano Vargas_

_Spain 1500_

O~O

S

O

U

L...** Be careful**

Ashes

If every life is a river. then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you will look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.

My name once mean _son, grandson, friend, brother, beloved_. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out: Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.

I have crossed over to a place where I never thought i'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

O~O

We lived in a tiny village in Spain. It is gone now, but then it was called Encaleflora, the name of the lime flower, something bitter and something sweet mixed into one. It was a town that had been my family's home for more than five hundred years, a beautiful village in the most beautiful countryside in all of Aragon

It began on a hot day.

I was out in the garden when I something burning. Not lime flowers, only pure bitterness. Cores, rinds, pits. That was the way it started. That was the way our world disappeared.

On the day of the burning, my dearest friend, Elizabeta, ran into our yard and grabbed my hand, urging me to follow her.

_Let's run to the Plaza,_ Elizabeta said._ Let's see what's on fire._

Elizabeta was always curious, always fun. She had a laugh that reminded me of the sound of water. She was shorter than I, but even though my grandmother said Elizabeta's hair was too curly and her nose was too bumpy, I thought we looked like siblings.

Elizabeta and I were so close nothing could come between us. We had been best friends from the time we were babies. When I looked at my friend I saw not only the child she had been, but also the woman she was about to be. Other girls I knew talked behind your back and smiled at you falsely. Not Elizabeta. She knew who I was deep inside; I could be lazy sometimes; I believed in true love; I was head-strong and loyal, a friend until the end of time.

Because of our dark brown colored hair, Elizabeta and Ihad been given similar pet names as little children. I had been called Raven and Elizabeta had been crow. Our birthdays were one week apart, and at last we had turned sixteen. We thought about our futures, how they twined around each other, as if we were two strands of a single braid of fate. Even when we were married, we planed to live next door to each other. We thought we knew exactly what our lives were made of; still water, not a moving river.

We thought nothing would ever change.

On the burning day, we raced down to the Plaza, where we always went to fetch water. There was a well in the centerof the Plaza, and the water we pulled up in wooden buckets was saidto come from heaven. It was sweet and clear and so cold it made us shiver.

To the north stood the old Duke's palace, but he was gone, and our church council reported directly to the king, Ferdinand. The palace was empty, except for the soldiers' barracks and the center where letters could be posted. People said that the ghost of the Duke came down to drink the cold, clear water on windy nights and that you could hear him if you listened carefully. But today no one was drawing water from the well, not even a ghost. There were scores of men all around, but they hadn't come for water. Soldiers had built a pyre out of aged wood. Pine and old forest oak, all of it dry so it burst into flames the moment the lit torch touched the wood.

At first i thought the soldier were burning doves. White yhings were rising into the sky. I felt so sad for those poor birds, then I realized the burning pile was made of books. Pages flew upward, disaapearing, turning to embers and ash, drifting into nothingness.

I saw a man with a red circle on his coat, crying. He had a long beard, like my grandfather, but my grandfather would never cry, with tears streaming down his beard, there for all to see. The crying man was begging the soldiers not to throw his books on the fire, and they were laughing at him. A guard took a handful of ashes and tossed them onto the old man so that sparks flared all over his coat.

_He's from the_ alajama, Elizabeta whispered about the old man.

That was the part of town where Jews lived that some called the _juderia_. Our parents didn't allow us to go there. We were Christians. A hundred years beforehand most of the Jews in Spain had either had to convert or flee the country. The stubborn ones who remained and declared themselves to be Jews were the ones who lived behind the gates- the red circle people who seemed willing to do anything, even die, for their precious books; people who by law could not own land, marry out their faith, eat a meal with a Christian.

There were cinders floatingdown into Elizabeta's dark hair. She didn't notice, so I brushed them away.

_Those are his books, _Elizabeta said of the old man in the ashes. _The town council has posted down a new decree. No Jewish books, no medical books, no magic books._

I saw the way the soldiers treated this man. As if he were a bird caught in a snare made of his own bones. His coat had caught on fire, but he no longer cried. I think he may have looked at me. I think I may have looked back.

Elizabeta applauded with the other onlookers in the square when a soldier threw a bucket of cold water over the old man. I merely stood there.

My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made of the same dust. When ourdays here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden. My mother had put a finger to her lips when she told me this. She taught me some of what she'd learned from her father, secret things I must never repeat. Lessons that sounded as though they would be easy, but which turned out to be difficult. How to look at the stars and know their names. How to gaze into a bowl of water until it was possible to see all that existed in that one small bowl.

Once I fell asleep while gazing and my mother laughed when I awoke with a start, my chin in the water.

_I'm not smart enough to learn anything, _I had admitted.

_You don't learn such things, _my mother had said_ You feel them._

Now my mother saw me with Ekizabeta in the Plaza. She looked shocked to see us in the middle of a rioting, in a place we shouldn't be.

My mother had a basket of wool with her; she had been to the dye vats near the river, and her arms were tinted from her work. My mother was known for the yarn she sold. Whatever Abra did was beautiful; she had the ability to make somethingwonderous out ofsomething plain. That was her talent, one I envied. Any wool spun at her wheel was finer than the rest even though our sheep were as sillyas any others.

Sometimes I went with my mother when she called on her clients, carrying a baskets of yarns that was dyed every shade of blue imaginable. Turquoise, aqua, night blue, ultranarine, bird's egg blue, early morning blue, inside of a cloud blue, pond blue, river blue, blue as all eternity. My mother's hands were always blue, sometimes like water, sometimes like the sky, sometimes like the colors of a bird's feathers.

There in the Plaza, my mother looked like a piece of the sky coming right at me. A person should never come face-to-face with the sky. She looked as frightened as my grandmother did when she was angery. Fierce. Unrelenting. She ran over and grabbed me. There must have been sparks inmy hair as there had been in Elizabeta's, because my mother put her hands in my hair. She clasped my head so hard it hurt.

My mother and Ihad always been like brother and sister than son and mother, but not today. Today I was the child, one who should have known better to be in the Plaza. Without waiting for me to explain, my mother dragged me along, tugging on my hair. Sometimes I wished my hair was long enough to make me feel like I had wings. Even before the other children called me Raven, I had often dreamed I couldfly. I would fly until I coul go no farther, so far away no one had ever been there before. In my dreams I would enter into the garden where the roses were big enough for me to curl up inside them. I would know how to decipher symbols I had never seen in my waking life.

As we left the Plaza, I looked over my shoulder. The man with the red circle was curled up asthe guards kicked him. There were no roses, only the brightness of the flames. Ashes kept falling. The Plaza was dirty and gray.

Something from deep inside the world had crept up frpm the well; a monster set loose in our midst. The fire was his breath; the jeers all around were his snarls. I felt something burn inside me.

I called for Elizabeta, but she was too busy watching the guards to pay attention. My mother refused to let me stay alongside my friend.

_We're leaving and that's that. Never look at other people's bad fortune, _my mother said. _If you do, it will come back to find you instead of it's r_ightful owner.

O~O


	2. Bones

Incantation

By BlackBloodInsane

Disclaimer: I do not own Incantation or Hetalia

O~O

**Bones**

All day we couldhear people shouting in the streets. Stones were thrown; windows were smashed; the gates of the juderia were painted red, the color of the devil's work. In ediicts posted all over the village, the towns faters declared they were sick of the Jews stealing from them, although whathad been stolen was never disclosed.

Because some Jews were moneylenders, they were blamed for the town's recient bad fortune. In truth, everyone knew Jews were only permitted to lend money becaue the church wouldn't allow one Christan to lend money to another. How much money could there be in such dealings? The Jews weren't rich. In the walled off section of towns where they lived there were no lime trees, no ivy, no gardens filled with jasmine. In summer, the heat baked the bare earth into bricks. I had seen the children looking through the wall; they wore no shoes. At night the gates were locked, the way we locked the pens for our chickens and pigs.

People came to ask my grandfather, Roma Vargas, what he thought of what was happening in the Plaza. Our closest friends always wanted his advice. My father was a respected teacher. Boys in our village often came to study with him; only the best students, the brightest boys. These students were afraid of my grandfather, as I was, but there was something more in these boys' eyes: they admired him. They hurried to their lesson and bowwed when my grandfather walked in the door. They huddled around him to hear his wisdom, just asour friends did on the day of the burning.

My older brother, Lovino, was studying at the seminary. He was my grandparent's favorite, and for good reason. Lovino was compassionite and kind, a brillant student. Being at the seminary was an honnor, and Lovino passed many difficult exams before he was chosen. My grandfather had helped him in his studies toward becoming a priest; he'd worked hard with Lovino, teaching him Latin and Greek. I often heard my grandfather say a prayer for my brother when he thought no one could hear, not like the ones we said in chruch; something special, for Lovino alone.

No matter how proud I was, I missed my brother, especially today, when everything seemed so frightening. I knew we'd all feel better if Lovino was home.

As for me, to the great Roma Vargas I was nothingmore than a bothersome fly, not worth the least bit of attention. I was jealous, because my grandfather ignored me even when I asked the simpleest questions; Why did we light candles on some nights and not others? Why couldn't girls be educated?

_Take the child away, _he would call my grandmother whenever I questioned him. _Teach him how to make bread._

He felt this way about most young people and women, except my mother, whom he treated as though she were a son. He adored Abra, and because of this my mother thought she was the queen of all fate. My grandfather had let her run wild, so my mother was not afraid of anything or anyone. She could speak so many languages, people joked she could speak to the birds. She was so intelligent, that when my grandfather's friends came over for tea and heated discussions, my grandfather let her participate in the conversation. Women were not often allowed to do this. Abra had to sit behind a screen at these times. Otherwise men who were scholars might stop thinking about serious matters; one of them might even get it into his head that he should marry my mother.

Abra considered herself married for all eternity- even though my father, the love of her life, had been gone for so long. He was lost to illness when I was only a baby, in the time of the black fever. He left us before Icould remember him. But I remembered how much my mother loved him. She still wore the emerald ring my father had given her on their wedding day. She was partial to emeralds; she said they were the single thing that remained constant, always green, always the same.

O~O

When our friends gathered in our doorway on the burning day, my grandfather told them that the soldiers in the Plaza were driven by bloodlust and evil. A monster brought to life, just as I'd thought. Something let loose from the very deepest part of the earth.

_Stay away, _my grandfather told our friends._ You can't fight a monster with sticks and stones._

Even the pigs in our yard were frightened by the noise coming from the Plaza. Poor Dini, my special pet, hid under the porch. Other families killed a pig every spring to make chorizo sausages, but in my family we preferred green vegetables, so Dini was getting strong and fat. Elizabeta and I often sneaked him into my room and let him sleep on my bed while we played with him as if he were a doll. Once we dressed him up in my brother's baby clothes. When I called Dini by name he came running to me, and he would bow on command.

All the same, Dini was a baby pig, afraid of the screaming in the Plaza, refusing to come out from under the porch, even when called, which meant I would have to wash him later with lavender soap so my grandmother wouldn't complain that he was a filthy creature that should be sold at market.

My grandmother had long white hair that she braided and wore up, like most women her age. She knew all the tricks a young child might play, and she couldn't abide laziness. Sometimes I truly believe my grandmother could read the thoughts in my head, especially if they were thoughts of doing bad things, like climbing out the window at night to sneak through the Jones family's yard and meet Elizabeta so that we could dance in the field of sunflowers when the moon was high in the sky. My grandmother would always be waiting outside the window, ready to catch me when I came back. As punishment I would have to sweep not just the house, but also the yard where the chickens were kept.

Sometimes the little Jones brothers from next door, Alfred and Matthew, came to help me with my chores while their mother was out cutting sunflowers for the market. All the while we worked, my grand mother would watch with a tight, unfriendly smile. _See,_ she was telling me without saying a word. _Even the little brothers do a better job than you, and they are only eight and nine. _She would offer that Jones brothers drinks og iced lime, _alicante granizado, _or _horchata_, almond milk, treats she never offered to me.

Nothing I did was good enough for my grandmother. When she taught me how to make _kouclas,_ the dumplings we added to our favorite dish,_ adafina_, our Friday night chicken stew, she would stand over me. _Mix it faster, _shewould say.

Any dumpling I tried to make always fell apart. Unlike my mother, I did not make things more beautiful, Under my Grandmother's watchful eyes, I grew nervous and made mistakes.

_Don't cut your nails and let them fall! _my grandmother would tell me. _That is a sure way to be cursed._ She would gather my nail clippings together and burn them in a dish till they were nothing but ash. She said she wanted to protect me from any_ echizo,_ witchcraft; witches made spells out of nails and hair.

Once I used rouge before going to church on Sunday, and although I swore that the sun had burned me, my grandmother scrubbed my face with soap.

_You'll bring a curse on us, _she vowed.

It was little wonder I spent as much time as I could next Elizabeta's family. Elizabeta's home was not as clean as ours, or as well kept. There was no silver candlesticks o good linens; I still preferred it. Elizabeta's mother gave us almond cakes without our even asking. Elizabeta's mother told me I had nimble fingers on the days she taught us needle point. When I helped her with chores, she swore she couldn't have asked for a more helpful child. Once when Elizabeta was not in the room, her mother sighed and told me she wished Elizabeta were as pretty as I.

I laughed and said, _But she is! We look just like brother and sister._

Elizabeta's father was a quiet man, a cobbler who sat beside a pile of boots. He was easygoing and never raised his voice the way my grandfather did, but Elizabeta looked down on him. A man who fixed other people's shoes was worthless, she said. Elizabeta would someday marry her cousin Ludwig, who had come to live with her family when his own parents died of fever, and Elizabeta had high hopes for him.

_Ludwig is smart, _Elizabeta told me. _He'll take my father's olive grove and make us rich._

On the evening of the burning in the Plaza, I started to go to Elizabeta's house, but my grandmother came after me. Maybe one of the reasons I spent so much time at Elizabeta's was because of Ludwig. We both had parents who had died, and we often talked about that, how you don't forget such things, even if you don't exacty remember.

But going next door was impossible now. My grandmother had pulled me aside, into the yard we grew grapes. After all those ashes in the air, the vines smelled sweet.

_Your grandfather and I bought something for you on the day you were born, _my grandmother said. _On a day there's fire, there should also be water. You're sixteen now. You're old enough._

I was stunnedwhen she showed me a perfect strand of pearls. When my grandmother fastened them around my throat, I didn't know what to say. I wasn't used to her kindness.

The pearls were indeed as cold as water, but after a moment, they warmed to my skin.

_These were always meant for you, little Isaac,_ my grandmother said. I was even more stunned to have her call me by this special name that my mother had used for me long ago, when she sang me lullabies.

Sometimes my grandfather called my grandmother by a special name, one my mother said I should never repeat. The secret name sounded like glass, something broken and strange. My mother had laughed when I once gave her my impression of my grandfather calling for my grandmother. I sounded as if I were choking.

_That's the way love sounds, _my mother told me. _You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife._

I was beginning to understand. My grandmother's love was cold because she was afraid of things; that's why everything had to be perfect. I bowed my head and thanked her for her gift. Then, before I could stop myself, I threw my arms around her. The pearls were my treasure and my truth, and I would only wear them on special days. The most important days of my life.

The next morning, I was so deeply asleep that my mother had to shake me awake so that we could go shop in the Muslim quarter. In the middle of the night I had heard men talking in my grandfather's study under the stairs in the celler, they gathered in a room where I wasn't allowed. Their conversation ran together into a chant that filered through my sleep. In my dreams, I had walked through a gate. I often dreamed this, and my mother told me this was an unusual dream. It was a dream that some people never had, not if they stared into still water for days or weeks, not if they studied with the greatest teachers.

_What did the gate look like?_ My mother asked me that morning. _Wasit madeof gold or marble or emeralds? Was your father in the garden?_

I didn't want to disappoint my mother and tell her the truth; The gate in my dreams had been made out of bones. I didn't want to tell her that even though I'd had this dream many times, even though the garden was always the same, the gate was always different. In every dream I had no idea where I was. I was lost, unable to call out or find my own way. The only thing that remained the same was the garden, lush and emerald green.

We were not allowed to go into the alajama- for that you needed to be a person marked with a red circle- but we could go to the Muslim part of town, which was on the outskirts, since the _Mudejars,_ like the Jews, were not allowed to live side by side with Christians.

Abra fully understood their chatter, a mix of Spanish and Arabic, and could converse with the storekeepers while bargining for cinnamon and cloves and sweet blood oranges, whichwere red in the center, like a heart. In the Muslim stores there were enameled teapots, ceramic tiles, silk from Arabia sun by a thousand worms, candy made of sesame seeds and honey, copper bowls hammered with patterns that were so intricate there was no beginning and no end to their design.

We went out of our way to make one special visit whenever we went to the quarter. The wife of a Muslim doctor who always bought yarn from my mother was also kind enough to offer us cups of mint tea when we came into her garden. There was a red lily that grew there, which my mother said could only be found in this one place. It was a miricle lily, one that grew from true devotion. This Muslim woman loved hher husband as much as my mother had loved my father. The doctor's wife's perfect love had turned the lily red when she planted it in the ground and said a blessing over it; now it was one of a kind.

The doctor's wife needed yarn because she was making her husband a coat. Something he would be safe in; something that would last. She and my mother looked at each other as though they knew each other well. Certainly, they both knew we lived in a time when anyone could become an outcast, suddenly and without notice.

On this day, the doctor came to the window while my mother and his wife were searching through the basket for the perfect skein of yarn. The doctor was tall and quiet; a handsome, educated man. Some Christians didn't believe in the medicines he used; all the same, when they were ill, they often came to him for help.

His wife turned to him when he called a greeting to her, she held up some woolshe had chosen and said something in a mix of Spanish and Arabic.

_What did she say?_ I asked my mother.

_She said "The yarn woman has brought me something to help you fly, should you ever need to do so." She said that's why she's making his coat the same color as the sky, so he can blend in and never be seen if he needs to escape from Encaleflora._

I thought this was because there was talk in town of casting out any Muslim who wouldn't convert to Christianity- exacty what had been done to the Jews all those years ago. They called the Muslim converts _Moriscos_, but like most _Conversos_, they still weren't considered equals.

As we were walking home, my mother told me that love was the same in any language. She told me what the doctors responce to his wife had been, words that nearly brought my mother to tears.

_Fly away and leave you? Never._

The doctor's wife was sic_k _with somethingher husband couldn't cure despite all his medicinces. My mother was not a doctor, but she healed with herbs and chanting. She was known for her skills, just as she was known for her beautiful yarn. She could take a siders web and bind a sore so it wouldn't become puffy and green. She knew which mushrooms in the woods were goodto eat and which ones caused aches or blindness or even death. For the doctors, my mother had once made an amulet out of yarn and wood; the doctor's wife had slept with it under her pallet, but it had done nothing to cure her. Abra had also given the the doctor's wife a canister of honey lavender tea that helped most ailing people with their appetite, but every time we went to the quater, the doctor's wife was thinner, she was a shadow of herself waiting for my mother in the yard, beside the red lily.

My mother was a great healer, but there were mysteries that are meant a closed door, even to Abra.

When nothing helped the doctor's wife, the one thing left to do was ask fate what would happen. When we got home from the quater that day, my mother took out her cards. She kept them tied in a piece of blue silk that she stored beneath the pallet on her bed. The cards smelled like cinnabar, the perfume Abra used. They had odd letters on them, and those letters told the future.

The future of the Muslim doctor's wife made my mother put her cards away for along time.

O~O

Feliciano's name:

Isaac: "Laughter." Isaac was the much-loved son of Abraham and Sarah.

Lovino's name:

Eli: "High" or "scent." Eli was a high priest of Israel.


End file.
